It’s important for companies to have a vision or mission statement–even online businesses. This sets the business’ direction and also gives customers an overview of what the organization wishes to accomplish.

E-commerce vision or mission statements consist of a very short and concise statement that defines how the business expects to support its customers or clients.   Here are some examples of the mission statements of several successful online businesses:

Google:  “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Amazon: “Our vision is to be earth’s most customer centric company; To build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”

Facebook: “Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people’s real-world social connections.”

Twitter: ”Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing.”

Once you have your mission statement, you can clearly define your goals and objectives.  You first need to ask what is necessary to accomplish in order to reach the mission? The mission statement is the “what” part of the equation and the business goals is the ”how” part. 

Every online business has a different set of goals and objectives based on its products, services and target audience.  Business goals are action oriented.  You will use such verbs as “improve,” “establish,” “create” and “deliver.”  

Examples of goals for e-commerce sites include:

*Introduce a new product that offers advantages that are lacking in those developed by the competition.

*Establish new business development effort to grow business.

*Offer valuable information to current or potential customers.

*Build an e-commerce and online retail web site that provides a high-quality product at a competitive price.

*Offer a specific service to a target market.

Each Internet business needs to write several goals that provide details on how future efforts will be directed.  The goals are intended to help the business attain its mission and be successful.  

Establishing online business goals also helps you measure your progress, set priorities for yourself and your staff, keep you on track  and focused on the business’ direction and provide input on how to best use company resources.  

 Goals should be for the short term and accomplished within three years.  Many of the goals will need to be achieved in a year.  It is essential, however, to set goals that are achievable.  You do not want goals that are so easy to attain that they do not add anything to the business. Nor do you want to set goals that are so difficult to reach that they waste valuable time and resources.